CANCELED: Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society
Overture Center-Playhouse 201 State St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703
press release: We would love nothing more than present our 29th season to you live and in person this June as we planned. But, dear friends, a new way of life has intervened! Riches to Rags will be moved to 2021.
Never fear! We, at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society have always been light on our feet, nimble in the face of challenge, flexible throughout changing fortunes and venues, and we have a few tricks up our sleeve. Stephanie and Jeffrey are already planning for new musical treats as soon as we are permitted. You can look forward to some creative collaborations we’re cooking up for August—if it’s safe to do so—and a special celebratory mini-season over the holidays in late December. We’ll get there together!
All of us in the arts community have been upended by postponements and cancellations, but BDDS will survive this tsunami because of the unending and generous support of so many of you. Stay home and stay well!
Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society (BDDS) presents its 29th annual summer chamber music festival, RICHES TO RAGS, June 7 – 28, 2020. This festival features eight concerts over four weekends, each weekend offers two different programs. The venues are intimate: the state-of-the-art Collins Recital Hall in the new Hamel Music Center on the UW-Madison campus, The Playhouse at Overture Center, and the jewel box historic Stoughton Opera House.
In a rousing four-weekend festival, you'll hear great classical masterpieces and the best of contemporary works. A roster of musicians with national and international reputations guarantees fantastic performances. Concerts are spiked with stories about the music, mystery guests, and even door prizes. It's chamber music with a bang! Artistic directors and performers Stephanie Jutt, flute, and Jeffrey Sykes, piano, are joined by 21 musicians and one visual artist.
Like many of us throughout time, Beethoven worried about money. Once in a while he would come across a musical project that promised high return for a relatively low investment of time. We feature some of those projects in “Cash Cow” during our third weekend of concerts. The Piano Trio in B-flat Major, op. 11, and Beethoven’s folk song arrangements will be performed. Madison’s favorite soprano, the magnificent Emily Birsan, will join BDDS in performances of the folksongs as well as Three Irish Folksongs dramatically set by John Corigliano for flute and soprano. The program concludes with Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major, op. 70, no. 2, one of the great works of Beethoven’s middle period. Again, Visual artist Lisa A. Frank will create an exquisite video installation behind the performers on stage.
“Cash Cow” will be performed in The Playhouse, Overture Center for the Arts, Saturday, June 20, at 7:30 pm.
“Trash to Treasure,” shows how some composers are masters at turning musical “garbage” into gold. The program starts with Beethoven’s brilliant Variations in E-flat Major, op. 44, based on one of the trashiest tunes ever to grace the opera stage. The music of Maurice Emmanuel, strongly influenced by his studies of Hindu music, was derided as trash by his contemporaries. We include his Trois odelettes anacréontiques for soprano, flute, and piano, a ravishing treasure of the art song repertoire. Composer Dick Kattenburg died at the age of 24 at Auschwitz, his musical manuscripts left in a trunk in his aunt’s attic. Only recently recovered, his Quartet for flute, violin, cello, and piano shows his extraordinary talent. John Harbison created one of the masterpieces of 20th century art song, his Mirabai Songs, from poems of the 16th century Indian mystic Mirabai. The program, and the trio cycle, concludes with Beethoven’s great “Ghost” trio, the Piano Trio in D Major, op. 70, no. 1, a work that is built out of materials other composers would discard: four notes of the D major scale. It is one of his most powerful compositions and one of the greatest trios of all time.
“Trash to Treasure” will be performed in The Playhouse, Overture Center for the Arts, Sunday, June 21, at 2:30 pm.
This season will be special for two reasons. First, the RICHES. Concert societies around the world will celebrate Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday by programming complete cycles of his most famous works: the piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies. BDDS is celebrating too, but with a twist: we are stretching our season by a week in order to perform all nine of Beethoven’s piano trios scattered across five programs. We’re pairing the trios with readings from Beethoven’s letters and diaries that give deep insight into his life. The trios, each of which is musically rich, were among Beethoven’s best-selling works during his lifetime. They span a greater portion of his composing career than his sonatas, quartets, or symphonies, ranging from his opus 1 (1795) to his opus 121a (1824). Despite this, they tend to be undervalued and underperformed today, and rarely do you hear all nine trios in close succession.
For the RAGS, we’re ending our festival with the great rags of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries performed by the New England Ragtime Ensemble (NERE). The great composers of ragtime and early jazz, most of whom were African-American—Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Jelly Roll Morton, for example—never enjoyed even a fraction of the financial success of Beethoven, certainly not the level of success that their artistic achievements warranted. NERE will present two programs showcasing this monumental American musical achievement. Formed by Gunther Schuller in the early 1970s and reconstituted recently by one of its original members, flutist Stephanie Jutt, the ensemble is the leading ragtime chamber orchestra in the world.